“I’m not going to give up on love, I’m going to fight for it, I’m going to give it my all,” my friend Alice said to me as we sat outside at Ralph’s on Madison Avenue sipping skim cappuccinos and sharing a scone. Alice started dating Eric six months before, and about a month into their relationship, she realized they had to “fight for their love” to make their relationship work.
Eric, a charismatic writer and New York City stand-up comedian, asked Alice out after accidentally bumping into her on the Upper East Side. He stopped dead in his tracks when he locked eyes with Alice’s big, brown ones, and it definitely didn’t hurt that she was wearing a bright pink Alo yoga work-out outfit and a fresh blowout. His buzzcut didn’t deter her, and she couldn’t ignore how tall he was, but while their introduction started out as a rom-com meet cute, it quickly hit a downward spiral once they tried to intertwine their lives. He was a night owl, she fell asleep on the couch after dinner. He ate mostly red meat, she was a vegetarian. He wanted to have sex every night, she was good with getting down and dirty every two weeks. That’s when they started the uphill battle to make their relationship work, instead of understanding a basic, foundational Smart Girl Rule:
LOVE SHOULD BE EASY.
Especially in the beginning of a relationship. If making things work doesn’t come naturally, it won’t get better as time passes. On the contrary, it’s only going to get worse. Think of your new relationship as a fresh glass of Veuve Clicquot champagne. It starts off crisp and delicious, the perfect cool temperature, just the right amount of bubbles. But with every half hour that passes, the champagne gets warmer and the fizz decreases. All you can do is hope you’re drinking enough not to notice. A new relationship is the same. It should start off the best it could possibly be. Laughing at (fancy) restaurants, sex whenever wherever, inside jokes and couch cuddles. As the years pass, it won’t necessarily get worse, but it will never be the same as it was; crisp and new, perfect and cool.
Out of the blue, Eric stopped calling Alice, as if they didn’t have the most perfect date at the Carlyle a week before, ordering dirty martini after dirty martini until the piano music melted into itself and all they could hear were the sound of each other’s voices.
That’s when Alice called me, determined to make things works. “He hasn’t called, he hasn’t texted, but I know we have something real. So what if we’ve been fighting, it’s called having passion. I’m going to fight for this love if it’s the last thing I do. No matter how hard I need to work, I will make this relationship work.”
Alice didn’t call Eric either, of course, considering she’s a Smart Girl, and finally, after what felt like an eternity, he showed up at her apartment on 92nd and 1st avenue with a chocolate Nutella croissant in one hand and an iced sweet cream cold brew in the other. How could she say no to that? “We’re meant to be,” she said to me.
After three months of fighting about Eric’s overbearing mother, about Alice being too needy and not having enough of her own life, they decided to take the next “rational” step: moving in together. That’s when Eric told Alice that she was “too much,” and that’s when Alice tried to be something she wasn’t. Eric didn’t like her fake lashes, so she got them removed. He didn’t like how she walked around the city in yoga tights (even though that’s how he fell in love with her in the first place), so she’d always carry an extra jacket around her waist to cover her butt. Alice didn’t like that Eric didn’t have a real direction in his career, considering writing, to her, wasn’t a real job, and Eric couldn’t see the point of her earning another academic degree when she was turning 30 and still unemployed, living off of Daddy’s money. All signs pointed to No.
But they “fought for their love.” They didn’t want to “give up.” They met up in the evenings and had “conversations” for hours about their future. They wrote down the pros and cons of their relationship, why they should stay together vs. why they shouldn’t, they cried when there were more cons than pros, but exed them out and had passionate, dramatic sex to make up for it. And then, three years later, after wasting some of the best years of their life fighting and trying to fit puzzle pieces together that just didn’t match, they broke up.
Alice blocked Eric on all social media, and he moved to Thailand for three months to “find himself.” Now, Alice is still looking for love, but this time, after learning the hard way, she knows that when it’s right, it’s right, and she won’t have to fight that hard to make it work.
Don’t make the same mistake Alice made, and don’t waste these precious years of your own life working for something that should just be right. If the relationship is bumpy right off the bat, say bye-bye, open a fresh bottle of champagne and pour yourself the perfect glass.